Suspicious....
....about the timeframe coincidence. I think everyone thinks they are actually Phorm, and have had to disconnect the phones to stop the abusive telephone calls.
You've got to feel a bit sorry for German VoIP phone outfit snom, which has asked customers not to call it following an evidently troublesome office relocation. The firm's contact page explains: "We moved to our new offices on March 6, 2008, and unfortunately our phone lines have still not been connected (as of March 12, 2008 …
When a company I was contracted to decided to switch from BT's own PABX system to an Asterisk-based one (still using ISDN lines, mind you), they cut off the old system a week earlier than we asked them to. Luckily, it didn't take long to finish setting up the new system.
When a certain utilities company were kind enough to put a pneumatic drill straight through our fibre coming into the building we grabbed a couple of laptops with 3G data cards and had net access that way.
I'm sure any business that's meant to be as tech-savvy as snom could easily manage the same!
Paris because I'm sure even she could manage to set up the above!
> My office uses exclusively VoIP phones - but we publish a "POTS" number not SIP URLs.
which begs exactly my previous question: why don't you?!
> Mebbe Snom are doing just that - and don't actually have any internet connectivity...?
Snom not only has connectivity, they have appropriate SRV record in the DNS:
$ host -t srv _sip._udp.snom.com
_sip._udp.snom.com has SRV record 5060 5060 5060 intern.snom.com.
I am certain that if you dial just sip:anything@snom.com, you will get through. But this is not advertised on their contacts web page.
e164 does POTS to SIP mappings, and is a service often used with IP telephone systems to cut call costs, the system is DNS based, resolving POTS telephone numbers into xyz@gateway.corporation.com
A quick lookup of 0.3.3.8.9.3.0.3.9.4.e164.arpa returns, as Eugene said above sip:0@intern.snom.com
So if I pick up my desk phone, and dial SNOM's number, the phone call gets looked up in DNS against e164, and the call is completed over IP, or in this case it doesn't, as their SIP server is down as well as their POTS ;-)